The medical device industry produces a wide variety of electronic and mechanical devices for treating patient medical conditions. Depending upon the medical condition, medical devices can be surgically implanted or connected externally to the patient receiving treatment. Physicians use medical devices alone or in combination with drug therapies to treat patient medical conditions. For some medical conditions, medical devices provide the best, and sometimes the only, therapy to restore an individual to a more healthful condition and a fuller life.
Implantable medical devices are commonly used today to treat patients suffering from various ailments. Implantable medical devices can be used to treat any number of conditions such as pain, incontinence, movement disorders such as epilepsy and Parkinson's disease, and sleep apnea. Additional therapies appear promising to treat a variety of physiological, psychological, and emotional conditions. As the number of implantable medical device therapies has expanded, greater demands have been placed on the implantable medical device.
These devices provide treatment therapy by delivering electrical stimulation or drugs to various portions of the body and include, for example without limitation, neurostimulators, drug delivery devices, pacemakers, defibrillators, and cochlear implants. In the case of providing electrical stimulation, one or more electrodes are implanted within the body. A physician uses an external neural stimulator (ENS) connected to provide electrical energy to the electrodes and establish effective treatment parameters. Once efficacious treatment settings have been determined, an implantable neurostimulator (INS) (also known as an Implantable Pulse Generator (IPG)) replaces the ENS, is connected to the electrodes, and is implanted within the patient's body. In the case of providing drugs, a pump is implanted within the body. The pump is coupled to a catheter that delivers drugs to select portions of the body. Patients can be implanted with both INS and pump devices, or combination devices. INS and pump devices can be programmed and recharged while implanted within a patient to adjust treatment therapies over time without invasive surgery.
A physician programmer, typically a computer with associated electronics, can communicate with the ENS, INS, and pump devices using telemetry. A telemetry module is linked to the physician programmer with a cable or by wireless methods. A patient programmer and a patient charger can also communicate with implanted treatment devices, as well as with the physician programmer, via wired or wireless links. The physician or patient may want devices of the treatment system to communicate with one another via telemetry for any number of reasons including, for example, to recharge a power supply of the implanted device, to fine tune the therapy program, to exchange diagnostic data between devices, to account for changes in the disease being treated, or to account for migration of the implanted lead or catheter.
Known systems for programming a medical device have a number of disadvantages. In particular, many implanted pumps must be activated for programming by the presence of a strong magnet. Such a magnet is typically built into the telemetry module used to program the pump. In contrast, an INS is sometimes activated or deactivated by a strong magnet and therefore, a single telemetry module could not be used to communicate with both an INS and an implantable pump. In another example of known limitations, a physician programmer, patient programmer, ENS, patient charger, and other component devices of the telemetry programming system could not be uniformly connected to communicate with one another via telemetry. This limitation is especially problematic because telemetrically communicating devices must be held in close proximity to one another, and handling multiple devices during medical treatment is cumbersome. In yet another example, when the power supply of the implanted device needs to be recharged, the patient must physically hold the telemetry module close to his/her body. This can be of great inconvenience when it takes on the order of hours to fully recharge the power supply. These limitations required physicians and patients to use multiple programming devices, thereby increasing the cost, time, and complexity of handling and operating the various component devices of an implantable medical treatment system.